"Failures Did Not Stop Me From Experimenting and Trying New Things"

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1. Tell us about your background and journey.

Hi, I’m Suyash, a Growth Manager by profession and an entrepreneur from heart. If I am to describe myself in one word, then ‘Hustler’ will be my first pick.

An average student in academics & a passionate cricketer. I use to spend most of my college time in reading about new technology, innovations, marketing, and start-ups. Ever since my college, (I was 18 years old), I started my first earning by creating an informative website for Apparel Brand. Then with a spirit to explore more of marketing & sales,

I started selling mobile covers via Instagram. Slowly & steadily, I started working as interns with few startups creating content, handling social media marketing. After working with start-ups, I learned many things but most important lesson is that you should build something that solve some problem & create impact.

In college I started my own startup that is InstaKhoJ, a platform that is created to help students to get to know about the competitions going around the nation & for organizers to showcase their event, and even approach for support required in designing of events/competitions. We are able to take it upto good scale, saw a good traction of organizers & students but at that time, my biggest failure is I am not able to build a good team. After almost 2 Years of working, we officially announced that we are closing the platform.

However, failures did not stop me from experimenting and trying new things. I joined a B2B E-commerce Startup (Bijnis App) as full time Marketer with the objective of overcoming my failures, which I faced in my startup & to build a tech enabled B2B distribution channel which can bring a significant change in the life of a bijnis-man.

2. Tell us about your initiative COVID-19 Free Jobs Forum

COVID-19 Free Jobs Forum is a social initiative started by my colleague (Rajat Agarwal) & me. It is an open forum where we are asking details from job seekers and sharing that database of job seekers with industry recruiters who are currently hiring.

We are collecting only necessary details from job seeker, which can be useful for HR in hiring. To keep it very simple we are using google form to collect all the details of job seekers.

It is an open forum with no commercials involved with the core purpose of helping out individuals get back to work.

3. What motivates you to start this social initiative?

Lay-offs, firings, furloughs dominate the headlines. On 27th April I read a news article which read “A B2B Company lays off 3,000 Contract Workers”, this hit me hard & thought of helping out people.

The primary goal is to do something valuable that can help people getting back to jobs. In addition, I always thought of building a simplified job marketplace for job seekers as well job givers where hiring can be done with minimal efforts. As I did 150+ hiring till date where I use job portals, hiring agencies but I always use to see that there is a gap between what is demanded & what is supplied to you. So I took this situation as an experiment to build a simplified marketplace.

4. Who all are working in this initiative, any team?

Initially we do not have thoughts of building the team but we thought of scaling it up then we looked for few interns. Shoaiba is the one took responsibility in building up the team of interns. Our rockstars interns consist of Kavya Gupta, Aayush Rai, Aditya Agarwal & Anandita Saha, who all came from various background & working together as a team.

5. Being occupied in your job how you are able to manage this initiative side by side.

Initially it’s a bit hectic work as Rajat & I both were focusing on getting maximum job seekers & recruiters as well we were handling a big team in our company where we were doing job. Then we decided to divide the initiative work so it become more organized. We have passion to build something that motivate use to work till late nights, do all sort of manual works & discuss for hours how to create more value for job seekers & job givers.

One of the important thing is if you have passion of building something then irrespective of the circumstances, you are able to build it. I always think of Jack Ma’s words:

“It is not an opportunity but your responsibility to serve the community.”

6. How many people are currently using this forum?

I am proud to say that till date 10,000+ Job Seekers registered with us & 500+ Recruiters are hiring from that database. We have recruiter’s from all industries & we have seen a good traction of HR’s from Upgrad, PayTm, Internshala, MxPlayer, Junglee Games, NoBroker.com, Toppr, Extramarks etc.

We have job seekers majorly of every category from ground level sales person to senior leadership position people from companies like Uber India, OYO, Udaan, IndiaBulls, Zomato, Swiggy etc.

7. What are your future plans regarding COVID-19 Free Jobs Forum?

We are planning to start multiple activities, which can be helpful for job seekers. Once job seeker register with us we would sharing resources, which can be helpful in upskill like, free courses, how to prepare for interview, resume maker, mentor sessions etc. Recently for job seekers, we have created a live sheet where on daily basis new job openings use to be listed after verifying, here is the sheet link: https://bit.ly/JobsAndInternshipList

We do not have any plans to monetize this initiative as we are doing to help people as well to understand our leanings by building a simplified Job Marketplace. We will be continuing this initiative at large scale, as we know that all the companies, which has lay off employees currently, will definitely do hiring after some time at that time this database will be helpful for recruiters.

Form for Job Seekers or Job Giver: https://bit.ly/COVIDFreeJobsForum